Introduction Test result follow-up can be especially challenging in the Emergency Department (ED) due to its multiplicity of moving parts. ED physicians are under increasing pressure when treating patients due to the challenges of high volumes of patients, pressure for quick discharges in the face of space constraints, and complexities surrounding patient handover. Test result follow-up is a process that is complex and has several steps, each with their own potential for error. …
HiQuiPs: Patient Safety Fundamentals – Patient Fall Prevention
An 85-year-old woman who lives independently at home was hospitalized three days ago for pneumonia. She has multiple comorbidities, including dementia, hypertension and diabetic neuropathy. While in hospital, the patient’s care team noticed her losing balance, and it was determined that the patient was at high risk of falling. One evening, the patient attempted to go to the bathroom independently. She put on her glasses and took the cane provided to her, as …
HiQuiPs: Patient Safety Fundamentals – Reducing Pressure Injuries
Hilary Weatherby is a Registered Nurse working as a Patient Safety & Quality Improvement (QI) Specialist. Hilary helps teams apply QI methodology to organization-wide projects and reviews patient safety events for the purposes of continuous quality improvement across a large, downtown Toronto, hospital system. You are a medical student seeing patients on a medicine unit at your local community hospital. One of your patients is an 81-year-old female with Parkinson’s disease who was …
HiQuiPs: Using In Situ Stress Testing to Address Latent Safety Threats
It’s a night shift, quieter than usual, though you wouldn’t say so out loud. As if the thought is enough to tempt fate, EMS rolls by. You got no patch, no heads up. “Car accident, just outside the hospital,” a paramedic calls as the patient is transferred onto the trauma stretcher. All you hear are unintelligible moans. All you see is blood streaming from a severely injured face. But the team’s already working, …
HiQuiPs: Dashboards Demystified Part 2 – Designing Your Dashboard
Your meeting with hospital stakeholders on designing a dashboard to better care for COVID-19 patients who are experiencing homelessness was a resounding success. Everyone was engaged and helped craft a problem statement, KPIs, and OKRs that you then presented to your hospital IT team. Luckily, IT has the bandwidth available to support developing this dashboard—but they need your help through the process. In today’s post, we’ll go over the second phase of designing …
HiQuiPs: Dashboards Demystified Part 1 – Problem Identification
You are working in an inner city emergency department (ED) and you notice that there are 10 patients who are waiting for their COVID-19 test results. You know that these patients are all experiencing homelessness but you have no idea if they were all exposed at one place, what symptoms they’re experiencing, and how best to inform your local public health department. You create a spreadsheet to start keeping track of these details …